On Mon, Aug 30, 1999 at 03:22:42PM -0500, David DeSimone wrote:
> I wonder, though, if our original poster, who used a setting like
> folder="{imapserver}INBOX." was attempting to get Mutt to translate
> "+folder" into "{imapserver}INBOX.folder", which means a folder
> literally named "INBOX.folder" in the server's folder collection
> for this user? Perhaps the server isn't using "." as the directory
> delimiter after all... But these things are hard to guess. :)
There is no need to guess, this has been explained more or less
completely (and your memory is wrong about the exact folder=... line,
which might be part of your continuing confusion), but rather than try
to cover the whole thing again and not lose you this time around, let
me refer you to the definitive source:
http://andrew2.andrew.cmu.edu/cyrus/imapd/overview.html#mboxname
Perhaps the first sentence of the section "Mailbox Namespace" explains
it all:
The Cyrus IMAP server presents mailboxes using the netnews
namespace convention.
By netnews I believe they mean newsgroups as in usenet, etc. They
don't put things in terms like "directory" and "mailbox file", but one
of the things that is pretty clear is that '.' is their separator.
All users are under "user" (somewhat akin to /home), and "INBOX" is an
alias for "user.<username>". The last name found in a '.' delimited
list is treated as the mailbox, and the rest constitutes the path to
that mailbox. This leads to the strange (for IMAP) behavior that
Brendan mentioned about "mailboxes can also be directories".
Wow, this might be ingenious if it didn't go against the way every
IMAP client I know of works. I wish the people working on supporting
these servers in mutt the best of luck!
Also, since when I fully specified a path in mutt I was using '/', and
Cyrus clearly wants '.', mutt does appear to be doing proper
translation.
Brian
